Saturday, June 29, 2013

Boy are the Galaxy Note 3 rumors coming fast and furious this week. We’ve heard rumors about the Galaxy Note 3 display being between 5.7 and 6.3 inches. We’ve also heard that Samsung will offer an AMOLED and LCD Galaxy Note 3. As we get closer and closer to the announcement in late August, the rumors will definitely pick up and get even crazier.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

The next time Captain James T. Kirk brings the Enterprise in for repairs, he probably won’t use Federation credits, Klingon darseks or any other space buck. But he might use something a little bit closer to home.

PayPal, the e-commerce business that allows for online money transfers anywhere in the world, announced the launch of PayPal Galactic on Thursday. Intended to make universal space payments a reality -- and help Kirk pay for that warp drive tune up -- PayPal Galactic plans to bring together leaders in the scientific community to prepare and support the future of space commerce.

"Earth From Space" is a groundbreaking two-hour special that reveals a spectacular new space-based vision of our planet. Produced in extensive consultation with NASA scientists, NOVA takes data from earth-observing satellites and transforms it into dazzling visual sequences, each one exposing the intricate and surprising web of forces that sustains life on earth. Viewers witness how dust blown from the Sahara fertilizes the Amazon; how a vast submarine "waterfall" off Antarctica helps drive ocean currents around the world; and how the Sun's heating up of the southern Atlantic gives birth to a colossally powerful hurricane. From the microscopic world of water molecules vaporizing over the ocean to the magnetic field that is bigger than Earth itself, the show reveals the astonishing beauty and complexity of our dynamic planet.

Sony revised its Android-based SmartWatch with a higher-resolution, water resistant SmartWatch 2 model featuring NFC sync and a longer-lasting battery. The 1.6-inch SmartWatch 2 was announced two weeks after the company open-sourced the Android firmware for the original SmartWatch.

Monday, June 24, 2013

"Using the latest 4th generation Intel (Haswell) Core i5/i7 CPU, with the powerful Nvidia GTX650 enthusiast GPU, Giada has created a high-end mini computing platform that is targeted at living room computer needs and CEO-level business environments," the company said. "The D2308 also features 3 antennas for maximum signal reception and wireless throughput with a maximum speed of 450 Mbps."

Actual availability and pricing is unknown at this point, so stay tuned.

The company's previous model, the Gaida D2305, is listed here, and can be purchased through Amazon and Newegg for around $759 USD to give you a ballpark price point for the new model.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Summary: Believe it or not there are still a lot of folks walking around with a flip phone. These folks have never owned a smartphone, but many are feeling pressure to grab one. Here's a simple guide to catch up

Malwarebytes has released the first public beta of Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit, a rebranded and improved version of ZeroVulnerabilityLabs’ ExploitShield. And just as in its previous incarnation, Anti-Exploit is an extremely easy-to-use tool which protects popular applications from zero-day exploits, web-based vulnerability exploits and more.

Those selfies and food photos in your Instagram feed might soon be a little less stationary. Starting today, the Facebook-owned service will be adding video features to its popular iPhone and Android apps.

"We talk about Instagram as capturing and sharing the world's moments. It's not just about photography," Instagram founder Kevin Systrom told "Nightline" anchor Bill Weir in an exclusive interview. "There are a ton of moments in the world that can't be captured in single images."

The internet won – that's the message flooding Twitter. Microsoft's attempt to restrict the sales of pre-owned games and to tie consoles in to a rigorous online authentication regime has been quashed. Xbox One games will now work like Xbox 360 games – you can buy them, then take them back to your local store to trade them in for something else, or just give them to friends. They won't be tied to you, or your Xbox account; they will be yours to own and keep – well, as much as any commercial media release is yours to own and keep, which is much more complicated than many of us understand.

Andrew Collins and Andrew Pulver examine the acting career of James Gandolfini, who has died of a suspected heart attack in Italy aged 51. The actor was best known for his mobster role as Tony Soprano on TV series The Sopranos, but also appeared in Hollywood films such as Get Shorty and Killing Them Softly

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

In India, it was the technological breakthrough that revolutionised communications across what was then the vast British Raj – expediting the East India Company's total commercial dominance of the country, helping to suppress the 1857 uprising and providing newspaper readers in Britain with regular updates from the Empire.However, after 163 years, the days of the telegram – or taar in Hindi – are coming to an end with the dawn of the age of text messages and emails reaching India's rural poor for the first time.

Many people think that the future of electronics is going to include graphene, a sheet of carbon just a single atom thick that allows electrons to move through as if they were massless. Some of the first electronic devices involving graphene have already been built in the lab, but graphene presents its own challenges. It's not naturally a semiconductor, and most devices based on it have had poor performance due to current leakage. Now, researchers have put together a simple graphene-based test device that can operate at over 1.2GHz, and they used it as the basis for an all-graphene frequency mixer. Although the performance still isn't good enough for real-world use, it's a major step in the right direction.

AMD hasn't looked beyond the four walls of the x86 space. For years now, the IBM P6+ with 5GHz and the IBM zEnterprise 196 with 5.2GHz have been juggling ones and zeros. Last year, they were joined by the six-core chip zEnterprise EC12 with up to 5.5GHz. All of these chips are indeed commercially available, at least if your pockets are deep enough. IBM puts up to six of these chips on a multi-chip module (MCM), including 192MB of L4 cache, for the price of a nice single-family home in an expensive neighbourhood.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

It's tempting, isn't it? 802.11ac is a hot new wireless technology that boasts faster and at longer ranges than 802.11n, the current king of wireless standards. It does promise some seriously impressive speed improvements over 802.11n though, but because it's not finished, there are some things to consider if you're thinking about investing in it.

Here's what you need to know.

What Is 802.11ac?

You can safely bet that any device with Wi-Fi connectivity, from your laptop to your smartphone, supports at least wireless B or G, and if it came out within the past few years, it should support wireless N. 802.11n (or the latest draft of it, 802.11n-2009) is the fastest of the ones that are currently widely available. 802.11ac is a new Wi-Fi protocol and is intended to be the natural successor to 802.11n. You may have heard it called "5G Wi-Fi" or "Gigabit Wi-Fi."

Asus rolled out over a dozen Z87 chipset-based motherboards for the fourth-generation Core chip launch last week. The Taiwanese giant sandwiches its regular-looking boards with new versions of RoG (Republic of Gamers) and TUF (The Ultimate Force) variations. Asus, clearly, is keen to show that it doesn't solely rely on the technology contained within the ever-more-integrated processors from Intel.

About Me

I started in computing selling the TRS-80 many years ago in the early 80's and got hooked when I bought my own Coco (Color Computer). I've had a computer ever since.
I write short SF stories and Linux/OpenSource articles. I'm on Twitter as: http://twitter.com/ErnieMLopez/